I've been programming in Delphi with Midas/DataSnap for quite long time and quite happy with it. Moving to .NET I'm more than happy with the ADO.NET DataSet. For CRUD application, I'm highly uncomfortable with any kind of ORM. Generic data-structure with automatic diff/delta handling get my job done better for me, an average database application developer.
Tried to study Java years ago, and could not find similar idea implemented. The closest I could find is SDO (Service Data Object). I thought it should be widely adopted when I saw it, but I'm wrong. Even the spec is rather old now, I still hardly find many people discuss on it or use it extensively. Assuming from information I can find on the internet, SDO usage is highly passive.
Wondering if it's dying ? Any experience in SDO you want to share ? Manual DTO coding is always better ?